As animal births go, sea turtles arguably top the cuteness scale. Watching a hundred teeny turtles emerge from the sand, scrambling straight towards the sea in a gleeful mad dash for the future is nothing short of incredible.

From the sandy shore, each season’s new hatchlings embark on the same journey that their forebearers have made for more than a hundred million years. This year, though, there was a 200-million gallon surprise lying in wait for Alabaman and South Floridian hatchlings: the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill.

Scientists recently uncovered a new species of tiny insect in a cave on Easter Island. The find is exciting because most of the island’s native life has gone extinct, researchers said.

The still-unnamed insect was discovered in a cave within the Roiho lava flow in west-central Easter Island (also known as Rapa Nui) in the South Pacific Ocean. The species – roughly the size of a grain of rice – is a type of book louse, in the order Psocoptera, the family Lepidopsocidae and the genus Cyptophania.

“This could be very important for piecing the natural history of the island together,” said research leader Jut Wynne, ecologist with the Colorado Plateau Research Station at Northern Arizona University and a Ph.D. candidate in biology at Northern Arizona University.

In the 19th century, the slave trade and introduced European diseases decimated much of the indigenous human population.

The environment, too, has suffered from large-scale farming and the introduction of non-native species such as rats that flourished and devoured indigenous creatures. …

“This was once a tropical island with tropical vegetation,” Wynne told OurAmazingPlanet. “Now it basically looks like Scotland. We’re talking about an environment that has been completely transformed” from forest to grassland.

Where once tropical plants flourished, now the land is covered by grass and non-native forest. Today, livestock grazing, human tourism, climate change and the introduction of new non-native species threaten the indigenous ecosystem further.

Almost all of the organisms currently living on Easter Island are invasive species that have been introduced, Wynne said.

Hiding out in caves

But the scientists think some native creatures may have had better luck in the relatively protected environments of caves, which preserve some elements of the native ecosystem of the island.

The researchers embarked on a quest to search through these caves, “scrambling around on our hands and knees,” Wynne said. After a while he began to notice promising signs.

“Once you’re trained to look for these types of critters, they tend to jump out at you,” Wynne said.
The new book louse species was the first such example discovered, but the researchers think there’s a good chance their work will find more.

“That’s why this is really interesting from a scientific standpoint,” Wynne said. “Maybe we can find more organisms that are residual fauna that have been able to weather the environmental degradation on the island by retreating to caves.”

However, the scientists cannot yet be sure that the new species is actually native to Easter Island. It may also be an introduced species from somewhere else in Polynesia, perhaps, that has just not been catalogued elsewhere before.

An asylum-seeker who died during an attempted deportation had complained of breathing problems and asked for help seconds before he collapsed under three G4S private security guards, a witness claimed on Friday.

Medical Justice campaigners called on Tuesday for the suspension of all forced deportations until the truth about the death of Angolan refugee Jimmy Mubenga is discovered.

Britain: Black people are 27 times more likely to face stop and search by the police than whites: here.

To get jazzed up for the launch of “Opening the Way,” our new women’s history walk of downtown Manhattan, we hit the streets to talk to some people about women’s history. How much did they know about Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Elizabeth Jennings, and others? And did they know that these pioneers for change worked right in downtown Manhattan?